Super-rich splurge on $700,000 pens

NEW YORK — Forget about the $350 stilettos. Shoes with status these days come with $1,000 price tags. And $600 handbags have become so bourgeois. A-listers don't want to be seen with anything costing less than $5,000.

It's no secret that luxury sales have been booming over the past six years. But at a time when the average American is grousing about meager wage growth and feeling strapped by a 30-cent spike in the price of gas, splurging by the wealthy has risen to gaudy proportions as the super rich seek new heights in pampering, price tags and one-of-a-kind items that set them apart.

"There's this insatiable appetite for the most luxurious," said Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman's retail leasing sales division, who has brought European designers including Versace and Valentino to the United States over the past two decades.

Luxury sales worldwide topped $150 billion last year, of which 30 percent came from the United States, where such sales have been rebounding after taking a pause following the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to Telsey Advisory Group's James Hurley.

While U.S. store executives say that the weakening dollar has fueled a surge of tourists from Asia and emerging countries like Russia, whom experts say tend to go for the bling, luxury stores don't have to just wait for foreigners.

Sure, investment bankers and Internet entrepreneurs have kept luxury sales booming, but the latest source of new wealth are hedge fund managers — the top 25 last year made more than a combined $14 billion a year, according to Institutional Investor.

Experts believe luxury spending — growing at double-digit rates for many high-end purveyors — won't lose momentum.

Some social experts warn the trend will only increase tensions between the haves and have nots.

The over-the-top splurging is happening at a time when the income gap between the wealthy — those making more than $350,000 — and everyone else is the widest since the Depression Era. And while the average American worker's income increased 4.6 percent in 2006, the wealthy have enjoyed double-digit gains.

According to Carol Brodie, chief luxury officer at CurtCo Media, the publisher of the Robb Report, whose annual issue features the year's best-of-the-best like a $330,000 Mikimoto golden pearl choker, the super rich don't want just the expensive. What they are looking for is the rarest item, something that is custom-made and the best quality.